As a founder member of Mystery Women in 1997, promoting Crime Fiction has always been my passion.
Following the closure of Mystery Women, a new group was formed on 30th January 2012 promoting crime fiction.
New reviews are posted daily, but to search for earlier reviews please click on the Mystery People link below and select 'reviews' from the welcome page. This will display an alphabetic option for you to find the review you would like to read

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Thursday, 17 December 2015

'Dragon Day' by Lisa Brackmann

Published
by Soho Crime,

20 August 2015.

ISBN 978-1-61695-345-4

The evocation of modern day China
is magnificent.Our protagonist is
Ellie McEnroe who is living in Beijing where she represents a reclusive Chinese
artist.Ellie was a medic in the US
forces in the Iraq war but was invalided out when her leg was injured.She has recovered from the injury but still
suffers considerable pain and has memories which are equally painful.She speaks good Mandarin so she can
investigate in China without a language barrier.

Ellie,
in a previous adventure, encountered Sydney Cao a very powerful Shanghai
billionaire.He asks her to investigate
a Western friend of his son, Guwei, and she becomes involved with the social
circles of Guwei and his siblings, TianTian and Meimei.A waitress is murdered at one of TianTian's
parties and Ellie finds that she must investigate this.The connection of TianTian through his wife
to a highpowered official, Yang Junmin, makes Ellie's situation perilous.

The
contrasts of China between overwhelming wealth and privilege and squalid
conditions is frequently shown - with Ellie moving from the indecent privileges
of the Cao family to the poverty of the waitress who had shared a rough room in
the basement workings of an apartment block with a fellow immigrant to the
city.She travels, mainly between Beijing
and Shanghai, seeing the Chinese situation- high rise flats, old
neighbourhoods, building sites- from Hummer limos or fast trains or crowded
buses.

Ellie
is highly persistent, indeed often foolhardy, but she eventually gets
results!This is an interesting thriller
with a very modern background.

------

Reviewer: Jennifer S. Palmer

There
are two previous Ellie McEnroe mysteries and a stand alone thriller by Lisa
Brackmann.

Lisa Brackmannhas worked as an executive at a major motion picture studio,
an issues researcher in a presidential campaign, and was the
singer/songwriter/bassist in an LA rock band. Yes, she will do karaoke, and
she’s looking to buy a bass ukulele. Her debut novel, Rock Paper Tiger, set on the fringes of the Chinese art world, made
several “Best of 2010″ lists, including Amazon’s Top 100 Novels and Top 10
Mystery/Thrillers, and was nominated for the Strand Magazine Critics Award for
Best First Novel. Her second novel, Getaway,
won the Los Angeles Book Festival Grand Prize and was nominated for the T.
Jefferson Parker SCIBA award.

Jennifer PalmerThroughout my reading life crime fiction has been
a constant interest; I really enjoyed my 15 years as an expatriate in the Far
East, the Netherlands &
the USA
but occasionally the solace of closing my door to the outside world and sitting
reading was highly therapeutic. I now lecture to adults on historical topics
including Famous Historical Mysteries.

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About Me

From an early age I have been a lover of crime fiction. Discovering like minded people at my first crime conference at St Hilda’s Oxford in 1997, I was delighted when asked to join a new group for the promotion of female crime writers. In 1998 I took over the running of the group, which I did for the next thirteen years.
During that time I organised countless events promoting crime writers and in particular new writers. But apart from the sheer joy of reading, ‘I actually love books, not just the writing, the plot or the characters, but the sheer joy of holding a book has never abated for me. The greatest gift of my life has been the ability to read'.